Vowel length

TRAP/PALM/BATH

Scottish Standard English usually shows a single vowel for TRAP and PALM, and the same for BATH, represented here as /a/, though Abercrombie (1979: 75–76) observes that “quite a lot of people, particularly in Edinburgh” do have two vowels but with slightly different lexical incidence, giving rise to /A/ in e.g. value, salmon. The corresponding Scots vowel is CAT, whose realization tends to be more retracted in Glasgow (Macaulay 1977; Stuart-Smith 1999: 208) and even more so in Edinburgh (Johnston and Speitel 1983). Macaulay (1997) again found social stratification in the realization of /a/, with fronter variants in higher class speakers and backer ones in lower class speakers. Some of Macaulay’s Class I speakers showed the very front [æ] which is stereotypical of the speech of the middle-class ‘Kelvinside’/‘Morningside’ areas (Wells 1982: 403), where it is said that “‘sex is what the coal comes in’ and ‘rates are large rodents akin to mice’” (Johnston 1985: 37). As in Macaulay’s data, the working-class pronunciation in the 1997 Glasgow data was more retracted than that of middle-class informants, though with some unexpected alignment of allophonic variation with English English lexical incidence such that fronter allophones were found in e.g. cap [kap] and backer ones in e.g. car  (Stuart-Smith 1999: 209).